Zotero: an easy-to-use digital research tool
"Zotero is an easy-to-use yet powerful research tool that helps you gather, organize, and analyze sources (citations, full texts, web pages, images, and other objects), and lets you share the results of your research in a variety of ways. An extension to the popular open-source web browser Firefox, Zotero includes the best parts of older reference manager software (like EndNote) - the ability to store author, title, and publication fields and to export that information as formatted references - and the best parts of modern software and web applications (like iTunes and del.icio.us), such as the ability to interact, tag, and search in advanced ways. Zotero integrates tightly with online resources; it can sense when users are viewing a book, article, or other object on the web, and - on many major research and library sites - find and automatically save the full reference information for the item in the correct fields. Since it lives in the web browser, it can effortlessly transmit information to, and receive information from, other web services and applications; since it runs on one's personal computer, it can also communicate with software running there (such as Microsoft Word). And it can be used offline as well (e.g., on a plane, in an archive without WiFi)."
(Dan Cohen & Sean Takats)
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
Brand Toolkit: Firefox Web Browser
"Here is your guide to all things Firefox, the flagship brand in the Mozilla universe. It's full of guidelines, examples and tips to help you create websites and communications that are on brand and on style, both online and off.
The Firefox brand is a living thing. It grows, changes and adapts. So we want you to have easy access to the latest and greatest out there. And lo we created this toolkit. And it was good."
(Mozilla, 2012)
Fig.1 Mozilla's unabashedly self-promoting "A Different Kind of Browser" clip.
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
Pixlr: web-based photo editor
"Pixlr is the creator of online cloud-based image tools. Today we have two applications in our suite, one we call Pixlr Editor and the other is Pixlr Express. They are built in Flash and you need to have a Flash plug in to get it to work."
(Pixlr.com)
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
Google Buzz: more sharing and integrating through Gmail
"Google Buzz ...automatically brings social networking into Gmail and the rest of the Google-sphere. Whether or not you're big on social networking sites like Twitter or Facebook, Buzz offers a somewhat new and intriguing approach."
(Adam Pash, 9 February 2010, Lifehacker)
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
Watch Video…without Flash
"Dailymotion is excited to launch a new R&D platform dedicated to open video formats and web standards: openvideo.dailymotion.com. You don’t need the Adobe Flash plugin to watch videos on this platform - the only requirement is the latest version of Firefox, 3.5 beta, available here.
No plugins? No Flash?
Nope - for all content from Motionmakers and Official Users we are using the new HTML < video > tag, supported by Firefox 3.5, to display the video, and not any proprietary technology.
But wait - the video quality is lower and sound is sometimes crackly…
That’s normal…for now. The new encoding formats we’re using are Ogg, Theora + Vorbis. They’re not yet as good as other common codecs such as H264, ON2 VP6, but they comprise an open format that is not patented, is free to use, and is supported by the Mozilla foundation (http://blog.wikimedia.org/2009/01/26/mozilla-and-wikimedia-join-forces-to-support-open-video/). So don’t worry - it’s going to improve soon. We have a few tricks to improve the quality, but for the moment re-encoding 300,000 videos in this format forced us to compromise."
(Dailymotion Blog)
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
